1,034The Ruinstorm Breaks – Epilogue
The Crown of Ascension was approaching the edge of the Olympia system, accompanied by a disparate fleet of Tau and Imperial ships – the latter of a far greater variety than Farsight had thought possible from those records the Ethereals had made available. He tried to distract himself by looking at the scanning results, drawing on his limited knowledge of voidcraft to deduce the role each model had been intended for.
It didn't work. The weight of the recent events couldn't be dislodged so easily. Again and again, his mind kept returning to the bitter, undeniable truth : they had lost. Defeat wasn't something any Fire Warrior enjoyed dwelling upon, even though the precepts by which they were raised demanded that they do so in order to learn all possible lessons from failure so that they may do better next time.
But the sheer magnitude of their failure made it difficult to extract any insight from it.
The Ultramarines and their corrupt master were free of the Iron Cage. The evil that had been kept locked away for ten thousand years – O'Shovah still struggled to comprehend such a vast span of time, having previously discarded all Human claims of their empire's longevity as mere propaganda – was now free to roam the stars. The resources of the system had fallen under Guilliman's control, save for its eponymous planet – and even that was poor consolation, given the price it had required. For even Lord Perturabo's final gambit, which had cost him his homeworld, now locked within some manner of temporal anomaly that O'Vesa claimed made his non-existent brain hurt, had failed.
They had lost, and now they were running. The Imperials had to warn and reinforce the neighbouring systems, while the Tau had a much longer and more difficult journey ahead of them.
+It is not over,+ Kadeth whispered to him. +The war against Chaos never ends, no matter how many defeats we endure, or victories we snatch from the Primordial Annihilator's jaws. The Archenemy will never stop its attempts to bring Ruin to all, and neither can we stop fighting it.+
The Dawnblade was stored elsewhere in the ship, along with O'Shovah's Battlesuit, but the connection between him and the ancient weapon was as strong as when he held it in the warmachine's hand. He had a feeling he would hear Kadeth's voice until his dying day, no matter how far away from the relic weapon he might be.
In other circumstances, this would trouble him, but right now, he couldn't spare the energy to care.
The ghost was right, though that was scarce comfort. Farsight knew the truth of the Imperium now, how impossibly vast Humanity's stellar domain really was. It would take years, decades for any army to conquer it all, even one as powerful as the one they were fleeing from.
Fleeing. Farsight hated the very idea. He had fled once before, when he and O'Shaserra had fought the Imperium centuries ago, and been forced to retreat back behind the Gulf, the Ethereals' expansionist ambitions thwarted by the might of the World Eaters. At the time, he had believed that retreat was the only logical option before what he – still trapped by the lies of the Ethereals – had seen as the barbarism of the gue'ron'sha, but he'd consoled himself with the thought that much had been learned, and that in time, the Tau Empire would return.
This time, however, there was no safe haven waiting for them, no promised time of rebuilding and recovery. They were going home, yes, but that home had been defiled by the very adversary they were running from. They were returning to the empire their people had built and which had been usurped by the slaves of the Dark Master.
O'Shovah knew that nothing good awaited them there. He still remembered the horrific visions he'd seen when he had picked up the Dawnblade for the first time, and when he'd struck down the fiend which had possessed Aun'Shi. He could only hope that the images of the sept worlds being set ablaze and their populations dragged to the sacrificial altar had been warnings of the future, but if these horrors had already happened, then he would avenge the fallen and put an end to the Ethereals' evil.
True or not, one thing was inevitable : for the first time since the Mon'tau, civil war would descend upon his people. The guidance of the Ethereals which had united the divided Tau would be lost, even if the returning army succeeded. Farsight wouldn't allow any of that Caste to hold power over his people, even if there were still some left untouched by the Chaos conspiracy.
"The journey will be long," he murmured as Admiral Viel gave the order for the fleet to jump.
Reaching Olympia from Tau in the first place had taken months, and nearly every ship in the Kor'vattra had taken damage during the battle, and suffered crew losses to the madness unleashed by the breaking of the Iron Cage.
+Yes. Plenty of time for me to teach you and your companion what you need to know if you're to save your people.+
O'Shovah knew he wouldn't enjoy this learning. But that didn't matter. He had made a vow to atone for his transgression, and this one vow, he would not break.
As she sat cross-legged within her chamber aboard the Crown of Ascension, O'Shaserra's eyes were closed, but she was far from blind.
Ever since the battle against the skin-thief who had murdered Aun'Shi, she who was called Shadowsun by her people saw the same thing every time she closed her eyes. The roiling, infinite madness that laid underneath reality, and the terrible presences that lurked within it, forever waiting to be let loose by reckless use of mind-science.
The sight of it all filled her with terror, even though she knew what she saw was a mere fraction of the truth, filtered through her limited perceptions – an ant looking up at the sun, granted the merest understanding of the apocalyptic nuclear reactions that took place within the celestial disc. She wanted nothing more than to look away, but she knew that doing so wouldn't make it disappear : it would merely allow her to pretend it didn't exist for a time, and O'Shaserra refused to lie to herself. Instead, she forced herself to confront the horror.
And, amidst this madness, she could also see the chained, many-armed figure which had helped her before. She drew strength from its presence, even though it didn't seem to be aware of her, weakened as it was by the barbed chains that bound and bled it.
The figure had saved her once, and Shadowsun was not one to let debts go unpaid. That was her own promise, her own vow to balance the ones she had broken while in the Ethereals' thrall.
She would reclaim the Greater Good from the clutches of its own tainted creators.
The Liberated stood on the battlements of Lochos' outer walls once more, not far from where Justine had fought and banished Kazakital for the second time. The Inquisitor, the Custodes and the Living Saint were all looking up at the broken sky. Around them, the city-state's defenders were clearing the rubble of the repelled siege, pulling bodies out to be burned, and otherwise preparing for whatever evil next attempted to attack the planetary capital of the world now that it was sundered from the rest of the galaxy.
All three of them had witnessed the Warp in the past, including the unholy amalgamation of Materium and Immaterium that was the Ruinstorm. This was different : as far as they could tell, the sight of Olympia's time-shattered heavens didn't carry the seeds of corruption with it. Some people had gone mad after looking at it for too long, yes, but it seemed to be a 'pure' kind of madness, untouched by the Ruinous Powers, and the medicae were optimistic that those afflicted would recover in time.
None of them had known about the Last Contingency : not the Inquisitor, the Custodes, or even the Living Saint. But its activation had triggered the release of a data-package deep within the cogitators of the city-state's center of governance, which had turned on an hololithic record of Perturabo himself from before he had been forced into a Dreadnought sarcophagus by his accumulated injuries. The ancient specter had explained what had been done, his grief and regret obvious even across the chasm of ten millennia.
They were trapped on Olympia with all the heretics who had made planetfall before the Last Contingency had been enacted. Out of the many ways Felix had thought the attack on the Fourth Legion's homeworld might end, this hadn't been one of them.
"Saargon is still out there," said Justine, ragging the Inquisitor's attention back to the present. "His Chapter was still planetside when the Last Contingency was activated. I can feel his presence, despite his attempts to hide from me."
Of course. The Tome Keepers had run from Lochos after Kazakital's banishment, but they hadn't left the planet : to do so would have been to risk Guilliman's wrath, and not even Saargon was arrogant enough to think he could survive that.
"We will have to deal with him at some point," replied Felix, nodding at the Living Saint. "Any news from Sodalian ?"
"Not since the last garbled vox-transmission about the Plague-slaves emerging from the tainted forest in great numbers," said Zagreus. "What few long-range auspex scanners are still working don't return any vox activity in the region, and the thermal signatures are markedly unnatural."
"Then the city is lost," sighed the Inquisitor. "We need to keep an eye on it, but whoever we send will need to be quarantined after coming back. The last thing we need is for a scout to bring some Nurgle-brewed plague into the city after being infected while on patrol."
"Yes. As for the Chaos army which was besieging the Dodecapyrgion, it lost a lot of its forces in the attack and then when the fortress disappeared, but it is still dangerous."
"Get the officers together," decided Felix. "We'll talk to them, see what resources can be spared for a strike force. If we hit them before they can recover from the shock, we might be able to scatter them and hunt them down in smaller groups."
"And a victory would do wonders for morale as well," added Justine.
"Yes," nodded Felix. "Which is something we most definitely are going to need."
That the city-state hadn't succumbed to rioting and anarchy once news of what had happened had inevitably spread was a testament to the discipline and self-control of the Olympians, virtues which Felix wished he shared right now. It was taking a constant effort of will for the Inquisitor not to succumb to panic, which he felt was more than fair enough. He had gone from being imprisoned in the Thirteenth Legion's most terrible prison to fleeing through the Ruinstorm with news of Guilliman's resurrection, to the death of the God-Emperor, the collapse of the Iron Cage, and now this.
He was slightly surprised he was handling it as well as he was, something which he credited to Justine's comforting presence, and the fact that there was just so much to do he could keep his mind busy and avoid thinking about how doomed they all were.
"The one good thing about this whole mess," he said, "is that the heretics are probably as shocked, worried, and terrified about the situation as we are."
Justine chuckled. "Still the optimist, I see."
Lucarnos walked out of the defiled administration center, and beheld a city of the dead.
Thousands of specters floated around the desolate city. Their ethereal forms, which still sported the wounds which had killed them, glowed with a pale inner light that gave off no heat and little illumination. Still, the broken skies of Olympia gave off more than enough light for the Iron Warrior's transhuman eyes to see.
Amidst the ruins, the survivors were at work pulling the desecrated corpses of their ghostly protectors off the Beastkin's gruesome constructions. There was no time for the elaborate funerary rites they deserved : with so many corpses, the risk of sickness was too great, especially with the forces of Nurgle still present on the planet. No, the dead of Kardis would have to be content with being gathered and burned in great pyres. Their specters didn't seem too bothered, keeping watch over their living kin as they gathered their remains and brought them to the blazing corpse piles.
Lucarnos' grip tightened around his hammer. So, so many dead. He doubted the city-state would ever recover from it, even if the world somehow managed to endure its new isolation.
His new bond with the dead of Kardis had opened his mind to a whole new realm he'd never known existed. Lucarnos didn't know how this was possible : his best guess was that he'd been a latent psyker, whose gift had been so minor as to be unnoticed by the rigorous screening all aspirant Iron Warriors went through, and which had blossomed under unique circumstances.
Now, he could sense the presence of his sibling's wraith, hovering just behind him, silently watching. He didn't dare turn to look at her : he wasn't sure he could stop himself from weeping if he saw her again, and the survivors who were looking up at him didn't need to see him weak. He was the last son of Perturabo in Kardis, and he would not shirk his duty.
He would make Kardis into a refuge for the living, a sanctuary from the perils that haunted the rest of Olympia. With the help of the dead, he would protect the living, and slay any fiend that sought to prey upon them, be they slave to Chaos or spawn of the Forbidden Zones.
And maybe, just maybe, if he saved enough people, the weight of his guilt would stop crushing him.
Uriel Ventris looked up at the broken skies of Olympia, and knew he was doomed to die on this world. Which was something he'd known was very likely when he'd received his orders from the Primarch, but not like this.
The Dodecapyrgion was gone, along with all the relics and warriors who'd still been in it when the … the event, had occurred. Where the great Fourth Legion fortress had once stood, now there was nothing but a deep crater, left by its sudden disappearance. Uriel had watched as the entire stronghold vanished, absorbed into a single point deep below the surface. He didn't know whether it had been obliterated as a result of whatever forces had been invoked to enact Olympia's isolation or moved elsewhere (or elsewhen), but it didn't change much.
They couldn't reach the fleet in orbit. The Death of Virtue was lost to him, along with all the treasures it still contained within its vaults. The psykers could still reach into the Warp and use their powers, but all attempts to contact the Black Crusade fleet had failed. To the wyrds' sixth senses, there was simply nothing past the sundered skies. They had tried teleporting out, and the results, while interesting from a strictly academic perspective, had been both costly and far from encouraging.
Faustinius had gone mad three days ago (not that there were days anymore on Olympia), trying to make sense of what had happened to the planet. For now, Uriel had managed to keep most of the warband together through sheer charisma, threats, and the potential of Faustinius finding a way to escape. A small number of mutants had left the camp in search of prey, but the Drinker of Sorrow didn't care about them. It was hard to care about anything, truth be told, when his every ambition had been dashed to pieces, leaving him stranded on a world whose importance to the rest of the galaxy had just about become nil.
"Lord Ventris," said a rasping voice. "I've found you at last."
Uriel turned, and despite everything he had seen recently, he still felt surprised as he recognized the hooded figure standing behind him, having somehow managed to approach him without any of his enhanced senses detecting him before he had spoken.
"Eodule," Uriel greeted the Mad Seer warily. "What are you doing here ? I know the Primarch didn't send you down here."
"No, he did not," nodded Eodule. "I came here out of my own volition, aboard one of the Maccrage's Honour's escape pods. Unfortunately, I am not a pilot, so I landed far from here and had to make my way on foot."
"What ?" asked Uriel, utterly befuddled. "Why ? Why would you do such a thing ? You are trapped here now, same as the rest of us !"
"Why, to get you out, of course. Your part in this drama is not yet finished."
Uriel looked at the madman for a long time. He had thought he was coming to term with his exile to this world, had already begun considering what to do and how to build up his power base on Olympia. But the mere idea that Eodule might be able to help him escape was a temptation he couldn't resist, no matter how unlikely or insanely risky it might be.
"How ?" he asked.
And Eodule told him. For a moment, Uriel wondered if he had misheard, before remembering the Mad Seer's reputation.
"Is there truly no other way ?" Uriel asked, knowing the answer.
Grinning like the lunatic he was, Eodule shook his head.
This, thought Uriel Ventris, was going to be unpleasant. But he would endure it, if it meant even the tiniest chance of escaping this doom.
Once again, the Court of Discordia was empty, leaving Guilliman to mull on recent events. The remnants of Perturabo's remote-controlled Dreadnought chassis had been swept aside, to be melted and recast into chamberpots for the mutant slaves of the battleship's lowest levels, while Forgebreaker had been taken by his Warpsmiths into the vast forges of the Maccrage's Honour. He wasn't sure what to do with it, but he was confident he could figure out something suitable.
Guilliman was confident that he still destroy Olympia, even now. The world might be temporally dislocated from the rest of the universe, but it still received light and heat from the system's sun, and there were methods available to him that could kill that star, plunging the world into freezing darkness.
Tempting. So, so very tempting. But that would take time, and require the use of irreplaceable resources and weapons, all of which were in short supply right now, and it wouldn't accomplish anything from a strategic perspective, given the planet was already effectively off the board.
No, better to let a planet stand as a monument to his brother's failure, so that Perturabo might suffer the grief of knowing he'd sacrificed his homeworld for nothing until the day Guilliman caught up with him and put him out of his misery.
Before the Dark Master of Chaos was a map of the galaxy. Unlike what could be found on Imperial vessels, it wasn't a mere holographic projection, but a living, pulsating things, crafted from flesh, metal, glass and sorcery, self-updating every moment as a chorus of Neverborn whispered the reports of Guilliman's spies and informants to its enslaved machine-spirit, which was formed of the conjoined brains of a hundred of the greatest tacticians and geniuses to have been born in the Ruinstorm over the last ten thousand years, and further enhanced by the Dark Mechanicum in order to process such a flow of data.
This left the still-conscious minds of the brains' original owners in perpetual agony, but Guilliman didn't care. He was more concerned with what the map was telling him.
Segmentum Solar was aflame. The remnants of Sanguinius' failed gambit to seize victory in the Great Game for his patron had been reinforced by the Dark Prince's vengeful hand, seeking retribution for the insult dealt him by Lorgar on Terra. The demise of Sanguinius in the Angel War was a slight the Dark Prince couldn't tolerate, and the servants of Excess were answering the call of their Profligate Prince in number. The entire Order of the Ebon Chalice, subverted to Slaanesh by the machinations of the Great Angel, served as the vanguard of this onslaught.
Hundreds of worlds in Segmentum Solar had fallen to darkness, as cults rose seemingly out of thin air, and warbands of Blood Angels slipped through the broken Cadian Gate to answer the call of their deity. The total Slaaneshi forces thus mustered were considerable, but without a champion of Sanguinius' stature to lead them, the Dark Master judged their efforts doomed to failure. Still, they would harm the Imperium, and keep Lorgar and Omegon busy liberating the heart of Imperial space. For now, Guilliman could leave the situation as it was.
Cadia had fallen, and Bile's Black Legion was pouring through the Gate, a relentless tide battering the Imperial defenders holding the region. Vulkan and his Salamanders had already departed, sailing for the domain the Black Dragon's cultists had secured for him in Segmentum Obscurus. Both would have to be brought to heel, but while the Clonelord might be willing to bend the knee in exchange for the opportunity to continue his research into the creation of an evolved form of Mankind – something which Guilliman was interested in, as better slaves were always useful – Vulkan would never submit willingly.
The Dark Angels' efforts were dispersed across the galaxy, pursuing the will of their scheming god. Nine warhosts, each led by one of the First Legion's Grand Masters. Two had already been defeated : Azrael at Terathalion, and Belial in the Webway. Both Chaos Lords still lived, having returned to Cysgorog to face the censure of their maudlin Primarch. Nephalor was still operating around Cadia, hunting for the Living Saint who had risen from the breaking of the Gate and defeated Sigismund – Guilliman made a mental note to keep an eye on this 'Ciaphas Cain', for there were few of his father's puppets who had achieved as much as he had in so short a time. The remaining six Dark Angels warhosts were busy with their own appointed tasks, and were of no concern to Guilliman.
Dorn was on his was to Armageddon, gathering his broken Legion on his way there. Guilliman had felt the ancient spell binding the Seventh Primarch to him shatter while on the way to Olympia, which was a complication he could have done without. However, without it, the Imperial Fists would soon begin to suffer the consequences of their allegiance to Khorne : whether they would survive or destroy themselves in an orgy of bloodshed against the Orks that laid siege to the Imperial world that had once been called Ullanor was yet to be determined.
The Yellow King … now there had been truly unpleasant surprise. Even in his slumber, Guilliman had sensed the echoes of the creature's machinations, but hadn't realized its nature until it had manifested at Light's End. Now another contender had joined the game. But Corax was already moving against it : perhaps the two would exhaust one another, leaving the victor vulnerable. He would have to see what he could do to drag on whatever nightmarish war the two of them would wage.
And then, there was Thiel's last taunt before Maccrage's destruction. His treacherous son had claimed that he wasn't the avatar of the ancient, long-gone Power whose existence Guilliman himself only knew from his ages-long contemplation of the Sea of Souls, but that such an avatar yet existed elsewhere in the galaxy. The Dark Master didn't think Thiel had been lying : with his mask as Marius Gage removed, the Lord of the Red-Marked had been just as incapable of deceiving his gene-sire as any other Ultramarine. He could hide things, of course, like the bomb he'd used to destroy Maccrage – Guilliman forced himself to relax his hands before the Talons of Might tore into the map – but not lie outright.
Given what Thiel had achieved with just a fragment of the dead Power's might, its real avatar was another potential threat to Guilliman's aims. The fact that his spies hadn't heard anything about them was worrying, but there was another issue : the fact that anything remained of it to be inherited in the first place infuriated him. When he'd claimed the title of Dark Master of Chaos, Guilliman had learned many of the Pantheon's secrets, but that one had been kept hidden from him.
Of course, this was hardly the first or greatest of the Powers' deceptions. Guilliman knew for a fact that the Chaos Gods had held back from bestowing their full power onto him during the rebellion, granting him exactly as much as was needed to defeat his father, who in turn had been too cowardly to draw upon the full extent of the Empyrean ahead of their confrontation. In the ages since, his agents had discovered ancient prophecies foretelling of the rise of a fifth Chaos God : the Dark King, whose dominion over Chaos would be absolute.
From the moment he'd learned of this, he'd known that this was his destiny, one that the Powers had denied him out of fear that he would become greater than them. He should have become the Dark King at Terra ten thousand years ago, but that had been stolen from him by the jealousy of the Chaos Gods and the machinations of his lessers.
It had taken him a hundred centuries to recover from this missed opportunity, and even now, he wasn't as powerful as he'd been during the Siege. Much as it galled him, Perturabo had had a point. He needed more power in order to impose his will upon the fractious forces of Chaos, and to crush the last remaining rivals for galactic domination. Fortunately, this was something he had foreseen and planned for during the long ages of his silent torment in stasis. He knew exactly where to go to claim such power, and reassert his superiority over his brothers :
Molech.
Although Volundr had fallen to the Demiurges, the Kin of Hashut's control over the forge-world wasn't absolute yet. There were still many regions of the planet where their forces hadn't gotten around to restoring order : Malachai Ruinmaker's forces were stretched thin across the world, and it would be many days before his iron grip tightened around the entire planet. Entire clans of tech-thralls still hid from their conquerors in the ruins of their world, huddled together in the shadows.
In the ruins of Iacopo's Ladder, where Skitarii, Neverborn and Demiurges had fought over layers of desolation, a shadow emerged from the piled debris. The shadow coalesced into the form of an Astartes in black armor, with the emblem of the Raven Guard displayed on his shoulder. In his hand, he held a container, covered in tiny Mechanicum script and humming with the noise of the miniaturized stasis field contained within.
The Pureblood looked up at the starts, their pale illumination tainted by the aetheric currents of the Ruinstorm. The paths he had taken to come here were no longer open to him. Like so much else, they had collapsed with the advent of Light's End. But there were other paths he could walk to travel between stars, and bring his prize back to his lord. These paths wouldn't be easy, but neither had the ones he'd walked to reach this point.
He would have to be careful. He could sense the presence of Guilliman, like a dark beacon that devoured the Immaterium's radiance to fuel itself. The Dark Master of Chaos would not look kindly upon the plans of the Nineteenth Legion if he ever learned their true scope. And the artefact the Pureblood had walked through the Orcus Gate to find and bring back to the Raven Guard was one every rebel Primarch would seek to seize if given the opportunity.
But he would succeed. He would slip past Guilliman's hounds, and reunite with his fellow hunters as they too returned with their prizes, gleaned from places and times that could only be reached through the Orcus Gate. Together, they would deliver to the Chief Apothecary what he needed to perform the Great Work with which they had been tasked by the Ravenlord.
The hunter's mind was far removed from anything which could be called human, even by the standards of the Nineteenth Legion. Deep alterations to his thought process had been required in order for him to survive crossing the Gate and navigate the broken, warped passages beyond. But still, as he slipped from shadow to shadow, he felt something that could be called curiosity.
After all, for all the horrid wonders he had beheld, he had never seen the Dark City of the Drukhari with his own eyes.
There were no screams on Malice anymore.
The Living World hurled through the shapeless tides of the Deep Warp, far from the burning touch of the Astronomican and the predator gazes of the Old Four, as it had done since its nightmarish, pain-wracked genesis thousands of years ago. But the mutating flesh that covered its surface no longer writhed in self-destructive violence, and the billion faces that had howled the planet's viciousness into the void no longer broke their endlessly regenerating vocal chords.
For Malice had a new master, one who would tolerate no such disharmonious disquiet in the perfect order it sought to create.
Sat on its throne atop the reborn Tower of Babel, the King in Yellow listened to the whispered prayers of Malice, identically repeated again and again and again. Next to the throne, two of its tools, which had once been Inquisitor Pontius Glaw and the Child of the Raven Ambrosius, knelt in abject supplication, their very essence slowly reshaped into new form more useful to their master.
Bathing in the mindless adoration of its slave, the avatar of a god who had yet to fully ascend mused on the latest developments it had sensed unfolding in the Materium.
Etrogar had refused its offer, as the Yellow King had known he would. It didn't matter : the time the Triarch had spent listening to its projection had been enough. For, as the Thirteenth had learned to his cost when that wretch Ollanius had finally succeeded in reaching him, even a few seconds of delay could make all the difference in the universe.
The Yellow King smiled. It remembered Ollanius, and the horror the old fool had felt when he'd first arrived on Terra too late, to witness the Emperor dead and the Thirteenth triumphant, the Third's broken body laying at his feet alongside his father's, had been a thing of beauty. Of course, that path had been one it couldn't allow to exist, since it was antithetical to its own eventuality, and so it had helped guide Ollanius' cutting hand as he found another way through Time, hoping to undo the Thirteenth's victory.
This time, the few seconds it had bought had been enough for the Thirteenth to realize the Fourth's trap and escape it. The Yellow King's plans still required the Thirteenth active in the galaxy rather than trapped on Olympia for the rest of eternity – or until the Imperial champions on that world managed to kill him, stripped of the last remnants of the Old Four's favor by his abject failure.
That would have been an unacceptable waste. The Thirteenth was a tool with so many uses, so many ways in which he could be wielded to shape the galaxy to the Yellow King's grand design. So it had intervened to ensure the Thirteenth's escape, one of many small miracles it had wrought across the stars since its incarnation and departure from Sancour, to forge the tools it would need for its design. The Thirteenth would continue on his quest to reclaim a glory that had never belonged to him, and in doing so would weaken the remaining threats to the Yellow King, until his use ran out, at which point he would be either eliminated or brought closer into the fold, depending on which of the Yellow King's many parallel schemes reached fruition first.
Gazing into the Deep War with eyeless sockets, the Yellow King smiled its corpse-grin, feeling something a lesser creature might have called satisfaction that all was proceeding as it intended.
AN : And here we are ! Writing this epilogue went faster than I expected.
Speaking of, my current goal is to write all of the following arcs by the end of the year at the latest, not necessarily in that order and not necessarily with those exact titles :
The Tartarus Reckoning
The Damnos Incident
The Damnation of Commoragh
As I said in the AN for the last chapter, these will be shorter than the Ruinstorm arc, with a single chapter each. And good news : for some reason, the Muse is being really generous recently, so the next chapter is already over 4k words down. Once these are done, I still have a lot of stuff I want to write in this universe, but I'll need to decide in which order to do so, which I don't anticipate being easy.
As always, I hope you enjoyed reading this chapter, and look forward to your thoughts and theories.
Zahariel out.